The information we have in the Universe is finite and limited, but our curiosity and wonder is forever insatiable. And always will be. — For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of the biggest existential questions we could formulate. How did humans come into existence on planet Earth? What are we made of, at a fundamental level? How big is the…

It isn’t just identical particles that can be entangled, but even those with fundamentally different properties interfere with each other. — In the quantum Universe, things behave very differently than our common experience would suggest. In the macroscopic world we’re familiar with, any object we can measure appears to have intrinsic properties that are independent of whether we observe it or not. We can measure things like mass, position, motion, duration…

The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova happened way back in 1604. The next one could be the key to solving the dark matter mystery. — In all the Universe, there are few mysteries that loom as large as dark matter. We know, from the gravitational effects we observe — at all times and on scales of an individual galaxy and upwards — that the normal matter in our Universe, along with the laws of gravity…

Most globular clusters appear to form their stars all at once, but there are exceptions. JWST just observed how “second formations” happen. — Over half a year since its first science image was released, JWST’s data continues to educate us.

Here on Earth, the Sun is our primary source of light, heat, and energy. But it also poses a grave threat to human civilization. — For life on Earth, there’s no more important source of energy than the Sun; without it, it’s doubtful that life would have arisen on Earth, and it certainly wouldn’t have evolved to give rise to the wild diversity of biological organisms seen today. But the Sun is more than just…

Human beings are tiny creatures compared to the 92 billion light-year wide observable Universe. How can we comprehend such large scales? — Here on Earth, human beings exist on the scale of meters, with the average human being a little less than two meters in height. Our typical experiences might take us three or four orders of magnitude away from that scale: down to millimeter scales or a little bit smaller, and…

JWST just found its first transiting exoplanet, and it’s 99% the size of Earth. But with no atmosphere seen, perhaps air is truly rare. — For many of us, when we turn our eyes skyward, we imagine much, much more than the stars, galaxies, and the expanse of empty space that separates them. Instead, we turn our thoughts to the worlds that orbit each one of those stars: massive, gas giant planets with their own…

Red dwarf stars were supposed to be inhospitable. But TOI-700, now with at least two potentially habitable worlds, is quite the exception. — Somewhere out there, likely right within the Milky Way lies the very first inhabited planet that humanity will discover. Although we don’t know which world it is or how long it will take us to find those critical, unambiguous biosignatures, we fully expect that progressively better and more suggestive observations…

JWST has seen more distant galaxies than any other observatory, ever. But many candidates for “most distant of all” are likely impostors. — Somewhere out there, in the distant recesses of the expanding Universe, is the farthest galaxy we’re capable of seeing. The farther away an object is, the more time it takes light to travel through the Universe to reach us. As we look to greater and greater distances, we’re seeing objects…